Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

…

If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

I disagree.

Amazon still owns and operates New World.

All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

The servers will be shut down in a few days.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

Yeah it hit that point a few days ago.

If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.

I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.

If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?

At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.

I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.

This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.

As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/08/23/concord-dev-writes-off-critics-why-would-i-care-about-a-bunch-of-talentless-freaks-hating-on-it/

The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.

The estimates I’ve seen from people going off of PS achievements for the game put total PS sales at about 15,000 compared to about 10,000 on Steam.

So that would equate to roughly an all time PSN concurrent player count high of 1,000.

The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.

47 playable days.

All time steam peak player count: 38,104.

Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.

…

Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.

15 playable days.

All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.

Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.

…

Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.

SubTote.

(A submersible capable tote bag)

There are a substantial amount of Republicans that think RATM is raging against what they are raging against.

All they heard was ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’ and … well literally none of any of their other lyrics apparently.

Because 90% of people only recognize the chorus of most songs, or even just a few words from the chorus.

Republicans in particular have a history of using ‘Born on the 4th of July’ even though the entire song is very critical of American society. The chorus, alone, isolated from context, seems to be about patriotism though!

Similarly, My Hero has a chorus about My Hero, so when played near Trump, that means he is their hero. Don’t think about the rest of the lyrics, they don’t matter.

on a see saw

Vegan Heart:

I mean, these borders might make for an interesting alt-history scenario?

… Bungie split off from MSFT in 2007.

Kind of the whole reason the Destiny games exist.

It is in the state he resides in.

‘A wild ride that I was not expecting’ could be the subtitle of my autobigraphy rofl.

When I played Smash Melee as a kid, a few of the neighbor kids would flail about so violently that they would rip their controller out of the console, elbow or armbar me in the face to the point I was bleeding and bruised, throw their controllers about the room breaking the controller and whatever it hit, and just outright kick or punch me with a free hand right as I was about to clinch a game.

Years later, I would learn that that one time I came home from school early and saw a man in a neat black suit talking with my dad, who quickly made an exit, this person was not in fact my dad’s friend from work.

He was a fucking FBI agent surveilling the house of the extremely violence normalized kids.

Turns out their dad was some kind of convicted felon in another state, moved here, and was suspected of illegally purchasing or possessing a firearm.

So yeah about half a year later violent-family dad was arrested.

PS: For added irony, my dad later fell down the Q Anon rabbit hole and showed me his whole set up and process for assembling/manufacturing ghost guns with no serial numbers.